Food and climate change and hypersensitive deniers at WUWT

In my experience, prolonged exposure to severe sharp pain can make a person hypersensitive to pain, at least temporarily.  Well I'm seeing the same effect with Anthony Watts at WUWT when it comes to fear.

Studies have suggested that some people process information via the amygdala more and they are hypersensitive to fear. That goes a long way to explaining the following. In fact it explains a lot about deniers. Deniers (ie the plebs as opposed to the disinformers) do appear to react strongly against anything that causes them to be scared. Their brain gets overloaded so they claim "it can't be true". I see it time and time again at WUWT. The words "scare" and "fear" come up a lot whenever climate science is discussed, with claims like "they are just trying to scare us".

Christopher Monckton knows very well that the threshold of fear among the denialati is much lower than average. He drafted an email which traded heavily on the scaredy cat tendency, you may recall (email here, which I discussed here). Any normal person would laugh or groan or tsk upon getting an email like that. I don't know how most deniers reacted. What I do know is that he managed to attract people to his events, so it's likely there were some people who didn't consign his email to the spam or trash folder.

Two days in a row Anthony's picked on perfectly normal headlines and claimed they are "hype".

Now hype happens all the time. Editors want to attract readers so they pick a headline that will scream for attention. Yet that wasn't the case in these two situations.  Here are the two cases (click read more if you are on the home page).

Willis Eschenbach wonders how bad is global warming & soothes the scaredy cats @wattsupwiththat

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has signed up to the "it's not bad" denier meme (archived here).  His article has the title: Should We Be Worried? and is aimed at quelling the fears of all the scaredy cats at WUWT.

To do so he decided to call up the monthly UAH charts.  Now monthly charts aren't that easy to read because the noise of the seasons and general fluctuations can make it hard to see the longer term warming signal.

Here is what Wondering Willis concluded from his examination of the data.  I've included the same data as Willis except that I've shown the anomalies as annual averages rather than monthly averages.

The tropics

Here is a chart of UAH lower troposphere temperature in the tropics together with global lower troposphere temperature.

Data Source: UAH

Willis wrote:

To start with, the tropics have no trend, that’s 40% of the planet. So all you folks who have been forecasting doom and gloom for the billions of poor people in the tropics? Sorry … no apparent threat there in the slightest. Well, actually there is a threat, which is the threat of increased energy prices from the futile war on carbon—rising energy prices hit the poor the hardest. But I digress …

Willis is one of those deniers who thinks that burning fossil fuels is the only way that "billions of poor people in the tropics" can produce all those goods that the wealthy people in the mid-latitudes want those "billions of poor people in the tropics" to make for them on the cheap. He is also one of those deniers who thinks the only thing that counts is surface temperature changes.

He's not far off with the trend - 0.06 degrees a decade but with a very low R squared.  At most a slight warming trend over the period since 1979.

Extra Tropics

Here is a chart of UAH lower troposphere temperature in the extra tropics together with global lower troposphere temperature.

Data Source: UAH

Willis wrote:

Southern Extratropics? No trend....Northern Extratropics? A barely visible trend, and no trend since 2000.

Barely visible? There is a marked trend in the northern extratropics (R squared = 0.71), of 0.25 degrees a decade. In the southern extratropics the trend is a less definite 0.09 degrees a decade.

South Pole

Here is a chart of what UAH calls South Pole temperature anomalies together with global lower troposphere temperature.

Data Source: UAH

This is what Willis had to say about it:

South of the Antarctic Circle? No trend, it cooled slightly then warmed slightly back to where it started.

This time he's pretty well right.  I don't think I've ever noticed that remarkable temperature anomaly in 1980, which was 0.86 above the 1981-2010 average.  Now that's an anomaly if ever there was one.

Addendum: There may be inaccuracies in the lower troposphere readings at high latitudes - see this paper by Richard E. Swanson - h/t Robert Grumbine in the comments.

North Pole

Here is a chart of what UAH calls North Pole temperature anomalies together with global lower troposphere temperature.

Data Source: UAH

This is what Willis wrote:

It cooled slightly over the first decade and a half. Then it warmed for a decade, and it has stayed even for a decade …

Clearly the Arctic is where there has been most warming of the lower troposphere. The trend is 0.45 degrees a decade. That's huge by any measure. And I wouldn't call the 2010 anomaly of 1.21 degrees above the 1981-2010 average as "staying even", would you?

Wondering Willis' Conclusion

Willis provides the required level of comfort to soothe the fears of the scaredy cat deniers:

My conclusion? I don’t see anything at all that is worrisome there. To me the surprising thing once again is the amazing stability of the planet’s temperature. A third of a century, and the temperature of the tropics hasn’t budged even the width of a hairline. That is an extremely stable system.

Now why does Willis decide that the world isn't warming to any great extent? Because he is choosing and selectively interpreting data to try to prove his hypothesis that the Earth doesn't have ice ages and interglacials.  He wrote:

I explain that as being the result of the thermoregulatory effect of emergent climate phenomena … you have a better explanation?

What data does Willis ignore?  All the temperature records prior to 1979, dating back to 1880 and before.  For example the land and ocean surface temperature anomalies.  The chart below shows UAH and GISTemp anomalies.  The surface temperature has gone up by one degree since the lows of the early twentieth century and by 0.8 degrees since 1880.  The lower troposphere has pretty well tracked the surface temperature, spanning minus 0.2 to plus 0.4, with an eyeballed rise of around 0.3 degrees since 1979.

Data Source: UAH and NASA

What Willis also did to pretend it isn't warming is present the data in a particular way to make it look (to uninformed deniers) as if it's barely warming.  He put up the following chart:

Source: WUWT

As if a change of plus or minus 3 degrees over three decades wouldn't be "catastrophic" to use a denier term!  And deniers insist on using monthly data because it helps to hide the signal from prying denier eyes.

A better explanation is the greenhouse effect ...

You may recall that Willis rejects the long term rise in global temperatures and has on more than one occasion claimed that temperatures have been +/- 0.3 degrees over the past century or so.  That's obviously not the case.  The global temperature has been going up, up, up much more than 0.3 degrees Celsius.

Willis asks for a "better explanation" than his "emergent climate phenomena".  How about the greenhouse effect!  That's the mainstream view of what is happening.

With more and more CO2 the temperature goes up. This results in various feedback mechanisms coming into play, such as more water evaporating so even more greenhouse gases causing Earth to warm up, and ice melt plus less spring snow cover so less reflected sunlight meaning more energy accumulating for longer.

From the WUWT comments

There aren't that many comments so far.  Here's a sample (archived here).

TimC doesn't seem to be aware that the land and ocean surface instruments are remarkably close to the satellite measures of temperature (as seen in the chart above) and says:

January 29, 2014 at 3:15 am
My answer to your question: No – and best now to ditch the surface thermometers entirely (with all their problems), and rely on the satellites instead for accurate measurement.
But shouldn’t it have been “What me worry”? …!

jim karock is a fake sceptic and blindly takes Wondering Willis at his word and says:

January 29, 2014 at 3:18 am
Willis wrote: “So that’s 70% of the planet with no appreciable temperature trend over the last third of a century”

JK – I’d love to see how the “experts” turn this into warming with their gridding of the Earth. Is there some trick that makes warming like Mann made hocky sticks from red noise?
What happens if you merely sum those 5 graphs with proper areas weighting?
Thanks
JK

LT says:

January 29, 2014 at 4:30 am
Why is there such a difference between UAH and RSS ?

UAH covers a bit more of Earth. Wikipedia says UAH covers 85 north to 85 south. The RSS data show that RSS only goes from 82.5 North to 70 South.  In any case, they aren't so different as this chart shows:

Data Source: UAH and RSS

A couple of years ago Roy Spencer speculated that the recent discrepancy between UAH and RSS may be in part because RSS is using an older satellite and may not be applying the correct correction for diurnal cycle drift.  Or it could be just the different coverage of the globe.  If anyone else knows more about this, please let us know.

Addendum: I'll repeat here - there may be inaccuracies in the lower troposphere readings at high latitudes - see this paper by Richard E. Swanson - h/t Robert Grumbine in the comments.


This looks like a live one - has anyone come across this chap before?  harrydhuffman (@harrydhuffman) says:

January 29, 2014 at 5:58 am
“Emergent phenomenon” is an argument from incompetent, third-rate thinkers like Richard Dawkins, determined to push Darwinian, or undirected, evolution upon students of science, despite its by now obvious failings; back in the 1980′s, it was called “order out of chaos”, elevated to the airy status of a “meme”, and “chaos theory” was misapplied to support it (for the latter really only supports “order behind the apparent chaos”, not order produced–”surprisingly”, as Eschenbach himself emphasizes–BY chaos, or randomly-working physical processes).

But the idea fails, and fails here on a very basic level. “Emergent phenomenon” does not “explain” the “extremely stable system”–and the outstanding stability SHOULD be emphasized, as I have also done–it cannot, it is in fact logically opposed to it (“emergent phenomenon” is change, as Eschenbach’s examples well show, while “extreme stability” MEANS unchanging).

The truth, as I mentioned when Eschenbach first brought out this recycled idea here, is much simpler (but more surprising, of course, in the tattered intellectual atmosphere of current, officially unquestionable, scientific dogma), and should have been obvious by now, if science had not gone so determinedly wrong following Darwin:

“Emergent Phenomenon”, Or Design?

“Emergent phenomenon” is a desperate renaming of the observable truth, in order to avoid that truth. It is anti-scientific nonsense, which science will have to reject before real progress can be made. It is, in short, the same as saying “magic”, which science once so proudly scorned, and by which it lifted itself up out of the ancient pit of superstition and “sacred writ”.

Here's an archive of Harry's blog.

Quote of the Week - Anthony Watts himself sums up the scaredy cat deniers at WUWT

I've often observed how much Anthony Watts and his 8% dismissives at WUWT are scared of being scared.  As Anthony himself points out, his "quote of the week" sums up Anthony and all his climate science denying fans very well. (Archived here.)  Anthony writes:

David Elder of Australia, commenting on this event at WUWT, condensed what many of us feel about global warming and environmentalism into a single sentence.

A great victory over the radical green extreme. We here in Oz have found WUWT invaluable in this cause. There has got to be a better way of stewardship for the planet than by scaring the hell out of everyone.

I won't comment on his giving credit to WUWT except to observe that almost no-one I meet has ever heard of Anthony Watts and WUWT.  If they had they'd agree they were all utter nutters.

For the rest, if there ever was an article on "stewardship of the planet" on WUWT, it was likely to be some harebrained scheme to destroy natural arid areas and all the life they contain by turning them into forests - by diverting water thousands of kilometres (and destroying natural waterways in the process) or bringing hordes of cloven footed beasts to wreck Australia's natural grasslands or some other wacky idea.  Even those wacky ideas are few and far between.  Most of the WUWT articles are to encourage the burning of fossil fuels so we go down the gurgler more quickly, or irrational disbelief and mockery of mainstream science and scientists, or wacky and paranoid conspiracy theories of the "one world government", or Agenda21 and climate science is a commie, fascist, socialist, treehugging, greenie, "Lysenkoist" plot kind.  They aren't the nuttiest of the utter nutters but they are moving quickly in that direction.

Global warming makes WUWT-ers crazy scared

The key element of the quote is "scaring the hell out of everyone".  Anthony and his WUWT fans are scared shitless of being scared.  And when it all comes down to it, the findings of climate science scare them more than anything.  That's one of the main reasons they protest it so much.  That's why they deny it. (The other reason is that they don't want governments to do anything to stop it. It offends their staunchly pro-individual anti-social ideology. See Smokey's comment on my other article for a classic example of both.)

Psychology shows that the conservative brain responds to fear.  And there is barely a more conservative brain that that of the average WUWT-er.  The disability is described here at alternet.org - an excerpt:

Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying.

Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala”. The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)

I have no sympathy for them and their destructive desires and simple minds.  Anthony Watts and his mob at WUWT are intent on becoming more scared by rejecting climate science and by rejecting any and all ways of mitigating global warming.  Even a conservative brain unable to manage complexity shouldn't be that dumb. It's not logical!

Matt Ridley Preys on People Who are Scared of Being Scared

Is it just me or are the fake skeptics getting nuttier?  I used to think Matt Ridley was a "lukewarmer" but now he's jumped into bed with a couple of crackpots from down-under: Bob Carter and the cartoonist and science denialist John Spooner (who wrote an incoherent article I discussed some months ago).

Bob Carter is known for saying he doesn't know what is happening to the climate.  He says he prefers to be called agnostic on climate change but he's kidding you.  Bob Carter is not agnostic nor sceptical.  He's at best an ideological science denier when it comes to climate science. He's also a conspiracy nutter of the Lysenko kind.

According to Matt Ridley on WUWT, Bob Carter and John Spooner have written a book for the scaredy cats.  The article is even titled as such so the scaredy cats will know it's for them: "Abnormal extreme weather? Just another scare tactic".  It's targeted squarely at people who are looking for reassurance that climates are not changing, that extreme weather isn't happening more often.

Research suggests that the conservative brain is ultra-sensitive to fear.  It's no surprise then that the fear factor is what drives some people to reject reality and turn to charlatans like Carter, Ridley and Monckton to tell them not to worry.  There's a sucker born every minute.

Going by the Ridley piece, Carter and Spooner are most likely saying that the record heat waves, extreme floods, storms, disastrous droughts and killer wildfires in various parts of the world in the past few years are either "normal" or didn't happen.  Ridley writes:

After demolishing many other arguments for carbon taxes and climate alarm, Carter runs through recent weather events, showing that there is nothing exceptional, let alone unprecedented, about recent droughts, floods, heat waves, cyclones or changes to the Great Barrier Reef.

Carter isn't known for originality either.  One imagines he will say - there was a big flood in the 18-somethings therefore no flood can ever be considered extreme.  Tell that to the residents of Gympie, who had five floods in two years, four of those in twelve months, and two of those back to back in the space of four weeks.

A scan of the media reports from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology show that heat records, drought records and wet records continue to be broken, with very few cold records being set.  So it's not just "extreme" events that seem to be happening more it's record-breaking events.  One thing is for certain, extreme weather that wasn't "normal" last century will become "normal" this century.  Another thing, I'll pay attention to what climate scientists like Drs Lewis and Karoly find and not heed the mewings from people who feed off scaredy cats, like Bob "not a climate scientist" Carter, Matt Ridley and a conservative cartoonist.

Matt Ridley has now shifted well and truly into the anti-science denial camp.  Like Richard Tol, he's hooked up with the GWPF, a lobby group in the UK whose main purpose is to stop the world shifting to clean energy and keep the proletariat in their place.

Ridley is also losing his writing skills if the article on WUWT is anything to go by.  It comes across as a last ditch rant against global warming of the "it's not happening" kind.

Matt, have a gander at these indicators and tell us global warming is "not happening":

In case you can't tell, I have no patience for tricksters like Matt Ridley, Bob Carter and John Spooner or the fools who look to them for comfort.